Illustration colorization

[libra]

Hello everybody. Sorry that I have been keeping such a low profile lately, I have started getting freelance work in that is keeping me very busy. I do visit daily though so I am around ;)

I need a bit of help here please.... I have about 200 of these horrible little black and white images to colourize. I don't have the time to redraw all of them again to add colour manually, so I was thinking of doing it through a combination of the colour adjustment layers and using the colourize option in the hue/saturation adjustments. I still want to retain the black outlines so I am going to have to do a lot of fiddly masking as well.

I have downscaled this example, but I will be working with 400dpi images that will be used for print.

Any other suggestions? This is going to take me a while, so any suggestions that would work to speed up the process would really be appreciated.

How would you tackle it?

[swillox]

Hi libra, this is what I can do,... 5 minutes job using essentially the magic wand at a tolerance of 12... I began with hue saturation setting for the main green aspect of the pic, then selected all body parts with the magic wand (hold shift to add selections, alt to unselect) then simply painted these with a huge brush (100px).

the shoes where also selected but colorized with hue saturation,...

about 5 minutes x 200 : 60 = 16,6 hours.

Well this all depends on what quality you want to end up with, so If I was you, I'd show 3 or 4 colorized images to them, asking if they are ok before colorizing the rest this way.

hope it helps.

[Scott]

Another option is to just set the black line layer to multiply then add a layer below it and use a brush to throw color on the bottom layer. Your black will stay in tact.

[libra]

Thanks for your advice guys. So far it isn't ending up being a 5 minute job, it is probably going to take a while. The line drawings are terrible and very mucky, so there is a lot of cleaning up involved, not as simple as I thought...

The multiply option works well on the cleaner images, thanks Jolt ;)